The Chinese Saving Puzzle and the Life-Cycle Hypothesis

By Franco Modigliani and Shi Larry Cao

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2004

China's per capita income ranks below 100th in the world. Its saving rate, however, has been one of the highest worldwide in recent decades. In this paper, we attempt to explain the seeming paradox within the framework of the Life-Cycle Hypothesis develop...

A Conversation with Amartya Sen

By Arjo Klamer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1989

Arjo Kalmer interviews Amayrtya Sen in December 1985. After some biographical and academic background, the discussion moves to welfare economics, rationality, and Adam Smith. In a postscript, Sen discusses the connection between his critique of the ration...

Political Economy of Public Policies: Insights from Distortions to Agricultural and Food Markets

By Kym Anderson, Gordon Rausser, and Johan Swinnen

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2013

The agricultural and food sector is an ideal case for investigating the political economy of public policies. Many of the policy developments in this sector since the 1950s have been sudden and transformational, while others have been gradual but persis...

Mobility and Conflict

By Sourav Bhattacharya, Joyee Deb, and Tapas Kundu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

We study the role of intergroup mobility in the emergence of conflict. Two groups compete for the right to allocate society's resources. We allow for costly intergroup mobility. The winning group offers an allocation, which the opposition can accept or re...

Recall Expectations and Duration Dependence

By Arash Nekoei and Andrea Weber

American Economic Review, May 2015

Using novel administrative data from Austria, we investigate the nature of temporary layoffs and recalls. We find that on average jobs ending in temporary layoffs lasted shorter but paid higher wages. The majority of temporarily laid-off workers return to...

JEL Classification System

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2016

Knowledge Spillovers and Patent Citations: Evidence from a Survey of Inventors

By Adam B. Jaffe, Manuel Trajtenberg, and Michael S. Fogarty

American Economic Review, May 2000

Fertility and Childlessness in the United States

By Thomas Baudin, David de la Croix, and Paula E. Gobbi

American Economic Review, June 2015

We develop a theory of fertility, distinguishing its intensive margin from its extensive margin. The deep parameters are identified using facts from the 1990 US Census: (i) fertility of mothers decreases with education; (ii) childlessness exhibits a U-sha...

Macroeconomic Uncertainty Indices Based on Nowcast and Forecast Error Distributions

By Barbara Rossi and Tatevik Sekhposyan

American Economic Review, May 2015

We propose new indices to measure macroeconomic uncertainty. The indices measure how unexpected a realization of a representative macroeconomic variable is relative to the unconditional forecast error distribution. We use forecast error distributions base...

Disruptive Change in the Taxi Business: The Case of Uber

By Judd Cramer and Alan B. Krueger

American Economic Review, May 2016

In most cities, the taxi industry is highly regulated and has restricted entry. Ride sharing services, such as Uber and Lyft, which use mobile internet technology to connect passengers and drivers, have begun to compete with traditional taxis. This paper ...

Can Electronic Procurement Improve Infrastructure Provision? Evidence from Public Works in India and Indonesia

By Sean Lewis-Faupel, Yusuf Neggers, Benjamin A. Olken, and Rohini Pande

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2016

This paper examines whether electronic procurement (e-procurement), which increases access to information and reduces personal interactions with potentially corrupt officials, improves procurement outcomes. We develop unique datasets from India and Indone...

Testing Efficient Risk Sharing with Heterogeneous Risk Preferences

By Maurizio Mazzocco and Shiv Saini

American Economic Review, February 2012

We propose a method that enables one to test efficient risk sharing even when households have different risk preferences. The method is composed of three tests. The first one determines whether in the data households have homogeneous risk preferences. The...

Art as an Investment and Conspicuous Consumption Good

By Benjamin R. Mandel

American Economic Review, September 2009

This paper provides a simple and empirically plausible model of artworks as investment vehicles. It reconciles the observation that average financial returns for collectibles are low and volatile with the theory of consumption-based asset pricing. Art ass...

Children's Resources in Collective Households: Identification, Estimation, and an Application to Child Poverty in Malawi

By Geoffrey R. Dunbar, Arthur Lewbel, and Krishna Pendakur

American Economic Review, February 2013

The share of household resources devoted to children is hard to identify because consumption is measured at the household level and goods can be shared. Using semiparametric restrictions on individual preferences within a collective model, we identify ...

Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality

By Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner, Georgi Kocharkov, and Cezar Santos

American Economic Review, May 2014

Has there been an increase in positive assortative mating? Does assortative mating contribute to household income inequality? Data from the United States Census Bureau suggests there has been a rise in assortative mating. Additionally, assortative mating ...

The Distribution of Wealth and the MPC: Implications of New European Data

By Christopher D. Carroll, Jiri Slacalek, and Kiichi Tokuoka

American Economic Review, May 2014

Using a standard, realistically calibrated model of buffer-stock saving with transitory and permanent income shocks, we study how cross-country differences in the wealth distribution and household income dynamics affect the marginal propensity to consume ...

Secular Stagnation in the Open Economy

By Gauti B. Eggertsson, Neil R. Mehrotra, and Lawrence H. Summers

American Economic Review, May 2016

Conditions of secular stagnation--low interest rates, below target inflation, and sluggish output growth--now characterize much of the global economy. We consider a simple two-country textbook model to examine how capital markets transmit secular stagnati...

Money and Asset Liquidity in Frictional Capital Markets

By Wei Cui and Sören Radde

American Economic Review, May 2016

We endogenize asset liquidity and financing constraints in a dynamic general equilibrium model with search frictions on capital markets. Assets traded on frictional capital markets are only partially saleable. Liquid assets, such as fiat money, instead, a...

Technology, International Trade, and Pollution from US Manufacturing

By Arik Levinson

American Economic Review, December 2009

Pollution emitted by US manufacturers declined markedly over the past several decades, even as real manufacturing output increased. I first show that most of the decline in US manufacturing pollution has resulted from changing production processes ("techn...

The Fundamental Institutions of China's Reforms and Development

By Chenggang Xu

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2011

China's economic reforms have resulted in spectacular growth and poverty reduction. However, China's institutions look ill-suited to achieve such a result, and they indeed suffer from serious shortcomings. To solve the "China puzzle," this paper analyzes ...